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Reflections on Thomas F. Torrance's Theological Science

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Reflections on Thomas F. Torrance's Theological Science FEATURE ARTICLE A MANIFESTO FOR INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT: Reflections on Thomas F. Torrance’s Theological Science (1969) Alister E. McGrath, DPhil, DD, DLitt, FRSA Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion University of Oxford [email protected] This lecture was given to the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship at the 2016 meeting of the American Academy of Religion. It focuses on my own multiple readings of one of Torrance’s best-known works, Theological Science (1969), exploring its strategy for encouraging and informing intellectual engagement between theology and other disciplines, most notably the natural sciences. The lecture locates Theological Science within the context of Torrance’s overall theological project, and considers its distinct approach to theological rationality and its wider implications. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Let me begin by expressing my delight at being able to honour the memory of Tom Torrance in this way. There is no doubt in my mind that Torrance is one of the most interesting and engaging British theologians of the 20th century, and it is quite likely that he’ll be one of the relatively few such theologians to find a readership in the next generation. Nobody really understands the mechanisms and factors governing the reception of the theological past. We can certainly try to make sense of why some writers continue to be read today where others have been discarded and forgotten. But we cannot predict whom the future will value and remember. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a core criterion is that a writer must continue to be useful; that is to say, a future generation must find a theological writer to engage meaningful questions in a manner and with a quality that seem to outshine more recent alternatives. That’s one of the reasons why I am confident that Torrance will continue to be remembered in coming decades. 1 Participatio is licensed by the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Participatio: The Journal of the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship Now before I go any further, I need to clarify a few points. First, I am not a specialist in Torrance. I am a theologian with various special interests — such as the relation of Christian theology to the natural sciences — which make Torrance a natural and winsome dialogue partner. And second, although I gladly use Torrance in developing my own theological approach, mine is not the same as his. I found the quality of his engagement with some important questions to be immensely helpful to me as I developed my own position, despite the differences which exist between us. Let me make it clear that my theological respect for Torrance does not depend on theological agreement with him at every point, but on my recognition of the quality and depth of his theological vision which demands to be engaged and (where possible!) appropriated. I make certain theological moves that Torrance does not. Yet this is not because I have misunderstood him, but because I have chosen to take a different course at points. So why is Torrance so significant? I suspect each of us here today would answer this question in slightly different ways, reflecting our own concerns and interests. It goes without saying, I think, that my own personal history and research agendas shape my particular response. I would like to give you four reasons for valuing him as a theologian, and I will be focusing on the fourth of these in my lecture this afternoon. The first reason is this: Torrance is an outstanding example of someone who consciously mediates the interpreted wisdom of the past. He is someone who is clearly nourished by the past, having appropriated and interpreted it in his own theological project. Many of you will enjoy, as I do, reading the works of C. S. Lewis. Professional theologians sometimes get irritated when I suggest that Lewis was one of the most significant theological voices of the 20th century, but I am unrepentant and unapologetic in this matter. One of Lewis’s most important reflections concerns how the present configures and incorporates the past, finding itself both nourished and critiqued by the wisdom of earlier generations as “the clean sea breeze of the centuries” blows through our minds.1 As it happens, Lewis wrote those words when commending Athanasius’ de Incarnatione as an example of the wisdom of the past which still retains its pertinence and luminosity today. Torrance mediates to us, in his own distinct way, a theological appropriation of the wisdom of Athanasius, John Calvin, and Karl Barth. Where some theologians invite us to break free from the past only to end up imprisoning us in the deficient and anaemic theological framework of modernity, Torrance invites us to be refreshed and reinvigorated by the classics of the past. 1 C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books” (1944) in Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 440. 2 A Manifesto for Intellectual Engagement My second reason for valuing Torrance builds on this. I’m a theologian of the Church of England. I don’t care for the word “Anglican” any more, as I no longer consider it particularly meaningful, either theologically or ecclesiologically. Like Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis, I prefer to articulate and affirm a consensual Christian orthodoxy rather than any of its specific denominational implementations, including my own. Now while I don’t theologize very much about my own ecclesial tradition, I most certainly theologize from within it. I find that the rich theological tradition of the Church of England gives me a context and a framework which enable me to do theology in a creative yet accountable way. I can draw on writers such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Thomas Traherne — just to give a few rather splendid seventeenth-century examples easily supplemented by writers such as Lewis and Sayers in more recent times — who offer me resources, both imaginative and conceptual, for my own attempts to do theology. Torrance is a leading representative of the Reformed theological tradition. It is not a tradition to which I myself belong; it is, however, a tradition which I treat with the greatest respect. Indeed, at times I feel slightly jealous of its formidable intellectual resources, evident in the realm of literature as in theology. (I am sure that I am not the only one here this afternoon who admires Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.) As I read Torrance, I see him both theologizing out of this tradition and theologizing about it. In other words, Torrance recognizes the Reformed tradition as offering both resources and stimuli for theological reflection, while the same time seeing himself as part of a community of faith that is, so to speak, responsible for safeguarding and advancing its distinct theological tradition (think, for example, of his School of Faith). Torrance, as you all know, is no passive recipient of the Reformed faith, but clearly sees himself as an active interpreter of this living theological tradition. In part, I believe that Torrance’s theological strengths reflect his active and informed participation in this chronologically extended process of theological reflection within the Reformed tradition, particularly with a clear affirmation of its distinctively Scottish embodiments and representatives. Now let me reassure you that I have no intention of jumping theological ships! I am very happy in my present ecclesial location, despite its obvious shortcomings and difficulties. But my own base within the Church of England helps me appreciate the distinct strengths of other such locations. I hope that those of you who are confessionally Reformed will allow me to pay you the compliment of acknowledging your obvious strengths to which, I believe, Torrance has contributed significantly. The third point at which Torrance has made a significant contribution concerns the interpenetration of historical and systematic theology. One of the many 3 Participatio: The Journal of the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship pleasures of being able to address this distinguished gathering is that since you already know so much about Torrance, I do not need to provide you with a survey of his academic and professional career. So I will merely highlight the importance of the fact that Torrance initially went to New College Edinburgh as Professor of Church History from 1950-2 and subsequently transitioned at an opportune moment to the chair of Christian Dogmatics, which he held from 1952 until his retirement in 1979. Torrance’s systematic theology involves engagement, criticism, and retrieval of the theological legacy of the past, especially the approaches of Athanasius, Calvin, and Barth. We might think of that famous quote from Barth (which Torrance might modify slightly in terms of the personalities to be engaged, but not in terms of the general principle at stake): As for theology, we cannot be in the church without taking responsibility as much for the theology of the past as for the theology of our own present day. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Schleiermacher and all the others are not dead but living. They still speak and demand a hearing as living voices, as surely as we know that they and we belong together in the church.2 Reading some of Torrance’s later writings — especially his two major late works The Trinitarian Faith (1988) and The Christian Doctrine of God (1996) — brings home to us the importance of this creative interplay between historic resources and contemporary reflection. Now there are points at which Torrance’s reading of the theological past may need nuancing. For example, I have niggling concerns that The Christian Doctrine of God seems, at times, to superimpose concepts upon an older theological vocabulary that are actually grounded in contemporary scientific culture.
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